How to talk about climate change: ‘Share from the heart and then the head’

“It was a complete breakthrough for me to realize that sharing from the heart, which is the opposite of what we’re taught to do as scientists, was the way for me to connect with people,” Katharine Hayhoe tells us in this episode of the Mongabay Newscast. “And then, after that connection, share from the head how we know this is real, we know it’s us, we know the impacts are serious, but we know there also are solutions. And the solutions bring it around full circle back to the heart, because the solutions are what give us the hope that we need to fix this thing.”

Our first guest on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, who teamed up last year with her local PBS station, KTTZ, to write and produce a web series called “Global Weirding.”

We check in with Hayhoe as she’s in the midst of shooting the second season of Global Weirding in order to get a sense of what to expect from the new episodes of the show and how Hayhoe views the overall political landscape around climate action today.

about me

I write about the things I'm interested in: the fascinating nuances of climate science, why a changing climate matters to real people, how we're going to solve it, and what faith has to do with fixing this global challenge.